SAGINAW, MI — Virginia Roselle Propp remembers Dr. Samuel H. Shaheen driving along King Road one warm summer day in the 1960s, heading for the little white clapboard office he kept on Dixie in Bridgeport Township.

“He stopped the car and got out to tell a lady there that she had better get in the house, that it was too hot for her to be outside,” said Propp, 78, of Saginaw, whose grandfather, father and daughter also were among Shaheen’s patients.

“Once, I called when I was coming down with the flu, and he saw me right away, on New Year’s night. My sister’s alive today because he came right to her house and took her to the hospital. That’s just the way he was.”

Hours after Shaheen died at age 85 of congestive heart failure Aug. 14, with his family gathered around him at St. Mary of Michigan hospital, many will recall the high-profile achievements that made him a household name in the region.

But sons Samuel J. Shaheen and Peter Shaheen and daughter Sabrina Cronin say it is Propp’s memory of their dad that better defines the man he was, with everything else evolving out of his love for his patients.

“Only two years ago, he took the tests in New Orleans to remain certified,” said his wife of 48 years, Patty Shaheen. “His medical practice was still very important to him.”

A visionary

Saginaw Mayor Greg Branch called Shaheen’s developments the pioneer
species that grows after a forest fire destroys all, providing the shade
that allows others to take root and in time restoring the forest to
full health.

Shaheen's family business, SSP Associates Inc., turned an abandoned Kmart in Saginaw Township into the State Street showpiece Horizons Conference Center, converted elementary schools to senior homes, championed a medical complex that transformed the South Washington corridor in Saginaw. In Bay City, the company is behind the Uptown Bay City development, a 43-acre riverfront complex now under construction.

“I don’t know that I could adequately describe the
impact Doc’s work has had on Saginaw,” Branch said. “The development up
and down Washington Avenue, from Tri-City Urology to the Tower building,
is incredible.

“Dr. Shaheen nurtured a sense of what Saginaw
could be,” Branch said. “He took a look at the industrial wasteland and
saw a huge cardiology complex. Eyes were rolling at that one, but he was
a visionary, a developer with money and guts.”

Making house calls

The Shaheens' children joined their mother and one of her 10 grandchildren
in the sun room at the family home in Golfside in Saginaw Township to
remember their father.

Stories soon flew, about how, after his own heart bypass surgery, Shaheen took his IV pole in hand and checked on his patients on other floors. Patty Shaheen told how they’d pack the kids in the car while he made house calls, and if everyone behaved, the family would go out to eat afterwards.

For years, she said, the family lived in rooms behind his medical office, “until people started asking him, ‘Doc, are you having spaghetti again tonight?’ catching a whiff of dinner, and he thought it was time to get our own place,” his wife said, laughing at the memory.

Added their daughter, “Many of his patients were elderly and young families, and he opened his first mobile home park as a way to provide affordable housing after hearing of problems they were facing. It was because he cared so much about their well-being.

“He was a tireless fighter.”

Shortly before Samuel and Patty married in 1965, Shaheen would see patients and then pull on some work clothes as he helped set the foundation for the Saginaw Mobile Home Park on Dixie.

“Saginaw was bustling back then with all the new manufacturing jobs coming to town, and he recruited other people to move here,” his son Samuel J. Shaheen said.

Ironically, Patty said, wiping away tears, it was Saginaw’s decline that led to Shaheen to the project that most will remember him for in time, the multimillion dollar restoration of the historic Temple Theatre.

“He told me that demolishing the Temple Theatre would destroy Saginaw’s spirit,” she said. “I thought, oh, another old building, but he was so right.”

Son of immigrants

Shaheen was born March 10, 1928, in Utica, N.Y., to Ike and Louise Shaheen, who emigrated from Lebanon, “and his father died when he was young,” his son Samuel Shaheen said. “I think that’s why he always kept us so close to him all the time.”

After graduating from Syracuse University and then the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1952, Shaheen took an internship at Saginaw Osteopathic Hospital and decided to stay.

His practice was open six days a week, including three nights, and he made house calls every Sunday.

“There were years when he delivered 200 to 250 babies, or about 3,000 over the years,” Samuel Shaheen said. “He was in family practice, but he did everything, including minor surgery.”

And when patients couldn’t pay, they’d drop off everything from fresh produce and baked goods to Barbie doll clothes and even handmade stained-glass lamps.

“One lady who didn’t want to feel like what she called a charity case would take yarn that Sam would buy for her and make us these beautiful blankets,” Patty Shaheen said. “We still have them draped all over the house.”

'He put us to work'

The family didn’t take big vacations and surround themselves with all the big-ticket items a doctor’s salary often buys. Instead, Samuel J. Shaheen said, “he put us to work on his four or five other professions. He was the captain, but we were all on the ship.”

Patty Shaheen remembered how as a teen, young Samuel was in the ditches, making sure dirt didn’t fall out of the backhoe as his father installed sewer lines to one of his mobile home parks. Sabrina Cronin remembered using a neon light to make sure she had completely cleaned toilets at one of the family’s nursing homes.

“He said the only way to really know the business was to work it from the bottom up,” his daughter said. “It’s the core of every job.”

Samuel H. Shaheen invested in others, too, his wife said, as they started their own businesses around Saginaw.

Local, state honors

Awards came Shaheen’s way through the years, including the Vision of Free Enterprise Award from the Saginaw County Chamber of Commerce, an honor now named after him; the Governor’s Award for Historical Preservation; the All-Area Arts Award and the NAACP’s “A Tribute to Saginaw Heroes.”

“We were also grand marshalls of the PRIDE Christmas Parade in 2004, which was great fun because we took our oldest granddaughter with us,” Patty Shaheen said. “We all learned how to do the wave.”

But his greatest pride was his family, they said, and after that came the Temple Theatre.

“What he did for Saginaw was incredible, the Temple Theatre alone single-handedly bringing downtown back to life,” said Nancy Koepke, director of the Saginaw Arts and Enrichment Commission.

“We have been so blessed. He could have retired years ago, but he has a passion for the community, and he devoted his life to it.”

Shaheen’s greatest legacy, added Richard Garber, is a family committed to carrying on his good works through SSP Associates Inc. and their own projects.

“His contributions to Saginaw are as significant as anyone in this community has ever made,” Garber said, asking people to close their eyes for a moment and imagine Saginaw without Dr. Samuel H. Shaheen.

“He was a remarkable man, humble and well-intended. He’d tell you what was on his mind, too, and that rubbed some people the wrong way. But he had integrity. When Doc and his family says something is going to be done, it is.”

It’s something Garber said has inspired him and others to give back and put the community first.

Shaheen himself told a reporter from The Saginaw News in 1997, shortly after erecting the Horizons Conference Center, “When you start doing something, I like to do it because there’s a little pride in doing something nicely. So you just try to do as nice a job as you can. You do it for the pride of ownership.”

Propp, who finally found a new doctor only a few years ago, says she still draws on Shaheen for comfort.

“You should have seen the way people’s faces lit up when he walked in the room,” she said. “You always knew Doctor Shaheen would know what to do. That’s the kind of man he was.”